I am a writer / composer / engineer / multi-instrumentalist based out of Brooklyn, New York. Some of my credits include Edfringe's Get Got (music and lyrics), the Secret Theater's Antigone (score), a few television pilots (Manahatta, Dropouts, The Minnesotan), and the short story Hills and Valleys (winner of the Henry Roth Award for Excellence in Fiction). My engineering experience ranges from musical theater (Get Got, Voiceless) to indie rock (Empire State Express, Prince Hal, Bulletproof Stockings) to jazz (Learning Curve's Gift). As a guitarist, pianist, bassist, and drummer, I have played with pop acts (Josh Groban), respected singer/songwriters (Hawksley Workman), and jazz greats (Sam Rivers). In the early 2000s, I fronted the band Adult Situations. You can follow me on twitter.

Kaiser Chiefs -- Education, Education, Education, and Rock

The English rock band Kaiser Chiefs have a new record out today, one that offers real drums, real guitars, real bass, real songs, and real vocals largely free of autotune.

So why should we care?

It would be easy to say, “Because the record happens to be good.” But there’s a much better, more complex reason for caring, even if the record happens to be good: Education, Education, Education & War offers those in the market for good rock music something like optimism; we should care because a real rock band might make it onto the charts in this otherwise One-Directionless One-Republic of Imagined Dragons. And if that were to happen, we might actually see this newest iteration of corporate rock depreciate in value.

Kaiser Chiefs in Munich (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Kaiser Chiefs are no strangers to charts, albeit mostly outside of this country. Over in the UK, they’ve occupied the number two position a few times. Same in Ireland. In America, they’ve only made it number to forty-five. However, a strange 2014 offers a shifting landscape for these overseas lads: people are starting to miss this kind of music again.

In a recent article entitled “Making The Bland” (called “Mock Stars” when posted online), Entertainment Weekly’s Nick Catucci lamented the dearth of today’s toothless rock, claiming the public has been “saddled with mock stars.” “What’s with the charisma deficit?” he asked, referring to Onerepublic, Imagine Dragons, Foster the People, Capital City, and other outfits in the mainstream—all of them consisting on unmemorable males. “They don’t even give us a glimmer of the cherished emblems of the classic rockstar: turbulent souls, incendiary lyrics, boa-draped fashion statements, dangerous good looks.”

Good words and pithy too, but more history is needed to contextualize the quagmire into which rock music has been slowly sinking. You see, Cartucci’s not wrong, but he’s a little late in posing a question like, “Where have all the rockstars gone?” Indeed, this is a phrase we’re all used to uttering.

We asked the question in the 1970s, when certain rockers famously went disco (I’m looking at you, Mick and Keith). We asked the question in the 80s, when the trappings of rock and roll seemed, by and large, to eclipse the music (The rise of the dreaded “hair” bands).

Yes, look through the backlogs and you’ll find this question asked perennially, usually in a landscape similar to today’s, in which dancier, bouncier music has taken over the mainstream: disco was king when we pined for rock in the 70s; new wave and mall pop were the media leaving those who loved rock cold; by the turn of the millennium, boy bands were the enemy.

Here we are fifteen years later, and despite a few indie upstarts in rock trends (The Strokes and all they begat; Likewise with Mumford and Sons), we’re still asking the same question.

But it feels deeper now. Now it’s not just “where have all the rock-stars gone”, it’s also, “where has all the rock music gone?” For these last fifteen years have not been kind to rock’s most trusted staple: the electric guitar.

In the eighties, the preening machismo of the hair bands might have been faked, but at least the guitars were real. And, to counterbalance all that LA-based testosterone, we had authentic scenes throughout the country generating independent music of their own (R.E.M. out of Athens, Georgia; The Replacements out of Minneapolis).

But today, crunchy synthesizers have thoroughly replaced the function of guitars in pop music: we haven’t seen so few guitars on the charts since the 1950s, since the days of bubblegum. To make matters worse, whatever indie scenes have popped up in answer to guitarless pop aren’t so much artistic as they are artisanal (I’m looking at you, Brooklyn). St. Vincent’s guitar sounds may be inventive, but they’re hardly emblematic of the jutting middle finger that makes rock so appealing in the first place; solipsism is no replacement for rebellion.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.